Idea2Product staff members, Will Van Noordt and Ray Huff, participated in the 2017 ‘Celebrate Undergraduate Research and Creativity Showcase‘ (CURC). The CURC is held each April for students enrolled at CSU to showcase what they have learned from their scholarly research, scientific inquiry, and/or creative endeavors. The project presented by Van Noordt and Huff was created for their Engineering Design II (MECH 202) course.

The first project was to disassemble something, in which case, Van Noordt and Huff tore apart a stepper motor. Once taken apart, they had to create an assembly guide that explains how it goes together. “5% of the grade were ‘wowpoints’,” Huff said.“We thought, why make a long set of photos on how to put it together when we could create a rendering model of it.”

Van Noordt worked in the Idea2Product lab to use SpaceClaim to model the motor with precise measurements and then put it into the rendering engine, KeyShot. “A rendering engine takes the model and defines light sources and surface properties,” Van Noordt explained. “For each pixels it casts a ray and then it calculates what color that pixel should be based on lights and shadows.” The image took a week and a half to render when normally this type of image would only take a day or two. There were about 3,600 frames to render.

Van Noordt and Huff then created the rendering into a video with Huff doing the voiceover and Van Noordt playing piano in the background. Van Noordt and Huff presented the video at CURC along with a 10 minute presentation about the video.

Winners will be announced at the CSU energy Institute’s Faculty and Student Forum on April 26th at the Lory Student Center. There are up to 6 awards that can be given from the showcase.